Photojournalism
Photography is nowhere near one of my strengths but I’ve had numerous opportunities to learn the technical aspect behind them and have done my best to apply those skills in practice. I’ve become a bit more familiar with cameras over time, but have learned the most about how to make the best use of my phone, which has been helpful.
New teacher photos
In addition to leading the production of the New Teacher Package my sophomore year, I also contributed three scenes to it. For this one, about a new graphic design teacher, I had gone with a photographer to get photos, but he hadn’t taken enough and many of them were from far away. I went back with my phone the next day and managed to get enough shots that we were able to find one to use in the package. I would have rathered to get pictures of her interacting with students than just against a wall, but I tried to do the best I could with the time I had, meaning the wall with posters about graphic design concepts was the closest I could get to it being in context while still having relatively okay lighting.
Dual Enrollment Night
This was a photo I took for one of my beats this year, which was previewing the upcoming Dual Enrollment Night. I had interviewed the guidance counselor who had helped organize the event and decided to take my dominant photo of her in front of the auditorium where the meeting would be taking place. While the background wasn’t the most aesthetically pleasing, I’m glad it was in context, especially since I had found a flyer for the event for her to hold up, and it was somewhat well lit. However, my phone had unexpectedly updated a few minutes prior to me going to take photos, so the quality isn’t as high as I would like it to be since the camera kept erroring. Looking back, I wish I had also framed the photo better to more clearly show the sign for the auditorium.
Multiple perspectives
One of the news briefs I wrote was about one of the teachers at my school bringing back the Introduction to Women’s Literature class. She’s a well-known teacher that a lot of students have had or interacted with, so I knew that having a photo of her in the story would help draw engagement as well as interest in the class itself. She let me take photos during one of her class periods and I tried to get as many different perspectives as possible, from her interacting with students to standing in front of a poster that had been made in the Women’s Lit class when it was at CCHS the first time a few years ago.
New York City
The session I did at the Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s Summer Workshop included lessons in photography from adviser Kori James. Even though I had been taught a lot of the basics before, the amount of time we spent on everything, from the basic concepts of lighting, to how to use a camera and its various settings, helped me grasp it a lot better. At the end of the week, part of our final assignment as we went out and explored Hudson Yards and Chelsea Market as a group was to compile a gallery of photos. The fact that we had spent so much time on mobile photography helped with this a lot since all I had was my phone. Here are some of the photos I took.
Growing as a photographer
One of the news briefs I wrote was about one of the teachers at my school bringing back the Introduction to Women’s Literature class. She’s a well-known teacher that a lot of students have had or interacted with, so I knew that having a photo of her in the story would help draw engagement as well as interest in the class itself. She let me take photos during one of her class periods and I tried to get as many different perspectives as possible, from her interacting with students to standing in front of a poster that had been made in the Women’s Lit class when it was at CCHS the first time a few years ago.
These photos I took, this time for a Journalism I spotlight, were of Journalism I student Olive Forrester at the beginning of my junior year. While there’s still room for improvement, I’m proud of how I executed the rule of thirds and better lighting with her photos more so than I did Lawrence’s. Forrester had talked a lot about her passion for photography and volleyball in my interview with her so I got a photo of her holding a camera as well as one of her holding up a photo from a volleyball match. I’m proud of how I was able to focus on the phone and blur out her face in the last photo despite only having my iPhone to work with.
Caption writing
The document on the left is my notes from the lessons we had on caption writing during Journalism I. We learned about the various parts of a caption as well as how to ensure the photo did what it needed to tell the story the caption was describing. The document on the right is a practice assignment we did where we had to take and write 10 photos and captions. Since ODYSSEY captions are so heavily built on the three-sentence, formulaic structure, this assignment was extremely helpful in practicing that.
I’d had a really good interview with this stakeholder about all of the work he’d done to help kids at risk of not graduating high school and what led him to that work, so condensing it all into a signal caption was definitely a challenge. However, I eventually managed to figure out what I wanted to focus on and what would be the most engaging to readers: what he does now and the impact he has on students, all of which helped to put the photo in context.